Mr. Jumbo Goes to Washington
April 4, 2008
“You are sitting in the great university that you’re sitting in now because of an earmark!” former Provost Sol Gittleman tells me, stabbing the air abruptly to make the point. And all these years I thought it was because of my SATs. We are talking in his office in Ballou Hall about twenty short words written into law over thirty years ago that have perhaps shaped this university more than anything else. In the late 70s, former Tufts President Jean Mayer and a lobbyist partnered to bring the university a $27 million injection of funds from the federal government that served as a springboard that some say saved the university from terminal decline. The importance of federal money to Tufts’ early successes underscores the importance of the continuing relationship between the university and politicians in the nation’s capitol.
The First Pork
“Academic earmarking was begun in 1976 by Jean Mayer at Tufts University,” Gittleman continues. To hear Professor Gittleman describe it, in person or in the written account put forth in his 2004 book An Entrepreneurial University, Jean Mayer’s pursuit of handouts from the Congress is an adventure tale: a heroic journey for university and country. The seventies were a dark time for Tufts. Financially, it was going bankrupt and its reputation was languishing as just another nondescript, small New England liberal arts college.A nutritionist by training, then-president Jean Mayer mostly fell into the political game after fielding a call from an aspiring consultant in Washington, Gerry Cassidy. Cassidy convinced Mayer that a foundation in nutrition sciences, paid for the U.S. government, could pave the way to a stronger university, despite the fact that Tufts had no experts or facilities in the discipline. To make a long story short, nutrition turned out to be an easy political sell to Massachusetts’ delegation to the Congress and Tufts soon after received an unprecedented $10 million giveaway, with the promise of more on the way. The money was appropriated for “an adult human nutrition center.” The center continues to exist today as the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging. The outlay allowed Tufts to build a research niche that attracted talent and fame to the struggling university.
The rest, as they say, is history. “That was the beginning. We built Tufts on a foundation of nutrition,” Gittleman proudly recounts. In his book All Politics is Local, U.S. Congressman Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House from 1977 to 1987 whose district included Tufts, wrote about the episode from his perspective. Describing the arm-twisting needed to direct $10 million for a Boston nutrition center to an unheard-of liberal arts college in Medford, O’Neill concludes, “If you’ve got power, use it. Your friends will understand.”
In retrospect, Tufts could not have understood at the time what they were getting themselves into. Since Tufts pioneered the process thirty years ago, the academic earmark “industry” has grown to $2.3 billion a year — a sizable chunk of the federal government’s budget. Earmarks for higher education have grown at breakneck pace. Over the past ten years academic outlays alone have quadrupled. Tufts’ early partnership with Gerry Cassidy also breathed life into the nascent lobbying industry, and his early success at Tufts catapulted the profession forward. In 2005 the Washington Post published a 25 part series detailing Cassidy’s rise to power and the birth of the modern lobbyist.
Wasteful federal earmarks, or “pork, projects” were made infamous by the 2005 revelation of a $315 million budget item for a “bridge to nowhere,” to be named after the Alaskan politician sponsoring the legislation. Ethics reform introduced by the most recent Congress has sought to curtail the practice by publicly identifying the sponsors of budget items, discouraging lawmakers from leaving a byline on wasteful projects. Voters’ anger at Republican legislators’ willingness to spend wastefully is thought to have been a deciding factor in the 2006 midterm elections, which awarded the Democrats majorities in both houses. Earmarks have been a factor in this year’s Presidential race as well: Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton routinely trade barbs about one another’s pet spending projects. Presumed Republican nominee John McCain has denounced the practice and stopped sponsoring earmarks.
The Nowhere Bridge
I ask Sol Gittleman what has since happened to the system of academic earmarking that Tufts spawned. “After that, whatever happened happened. Now it’s a big boondoggle and it’s corrupt and all that.” Of the billions of dollars handed out each year: “Waste, a lot of it waste,” he laments. As public sentiment has turned against earmarks, sponsors and recipients of funding have faced growing criticism and negative attention. Though politicians generally bear the brunt of their own projects, many beneficiaries of earmarks have been berated for perpetuating the system.But to many critics, the issue isn’t who gets the money but how they go about getting it. “The concern is that if there is any place where the peer-reviewed, competitive process is the gold standard, it’s the higher education community. The earmarking process is the antithesis of that,” says Steven Ellis, Vice President of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a non-partisan budget watchdog group. The erosion of competition for taxpayer dollars is seen as a particularly insidious problem for institutions that necessarily hold their own faculty to the highest standards of competitive practices. “University presidents and administrators realize that there’s a problem, but they can’t keep their hands off of it — they have to keep up with the Joneses.” James Glaser, Dean of Undergraduate Education, seems to echo Ellis’s comments. “[Earmarks] aren’t competitive,” Glaser exclaims. “It’s all who you know. If you benefit from an earmark it’s because your representative has set it up so money is delivered directly to your institution.” The discrepancy between a high-minded internal code of conduct and the relaxed standard for behavior with the government is a source of tension for many universities.
For Ellis and other critics, the political arbitration of funding is a perversion of institutions’ values and the government’s role. But the recipients at Tufts and other schools insist that the situation is more complicated. According to them, the untold story of the growth in academic pork spending is the accompanying drop-off in competitive funding sources. Since 2003, previously abundant sources of grant money such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation have dried up or remained stagnant. The decrease is largely due to budget realities dictated by America’s costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, educators that could previously rely on having several federally-subsidized projects a year ago are now turning to their local Congressmen to make up for the shortfall.
Indeed, the inefficacy of the peer-review process was one of the primary motivations behind Jean Mayer’s original bid in 1977. The university had considered applying for money from the NIH, but considered it unlikely that any interest would be paid to an out-of-the-way issue like nutrition.
Advocates for thriftier government also assert that much of the money handed out is wasted since universities aren’t prepared to utilize appropriated assets. And how much money is too much for higher education? The question is highly relevant to Tufts: if the government pays for a new laboratory dedicated to studying bioterrorism, is it also obliged to pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the facility? Should it pay for the scientists who operate it? The open-ended nature of the earmark leaves an extraordinary amount of “wiggle” room for the recipients; its terms are dictated by politics rather than need.
Tufts and D.C. Today
To advance its interests in the nation’s capital, the university retains Mr. James English, a former Senate staffer, to represent its interests in the capital. English did not respod to a request for an interview. According to public documents available on OpenSecrets.org, Tufts paid his organization, the K Street based law firm O’Connor & Hannan, $160,000 in 2007. Tufts appears to be the only university represented by the firm, whose other clients range from ExxonMobil to the California Sea Urchin Commission.I asked several students how they felt about Tufts’ hired gun in D.C. Many seemed concerned about the manner in which Tufts receives much federal funding, but believed the benefits outweighed ethical concerns. Brian Seymour, an economics major, approached the issue with a simple cost-benefit analysis. “[Tufts] paid a lobbyist $200,000 and got $900,000. It is worth it.” In a brief discussion, freshmen Kenneth Brand and Laura Glassman contemplated the necessity of Tufts’ approach to funding. “Lobbying for extra funds isn’t the most ethical thing,” remarked Brand, “but if all the other schools are lobbying it becomes necessary.” Glassman agreed. “If that’s the way universities are getting their funding then we have to do it.”
To learn more about the university’s presence in Washington, I sat down with Tufts administrator Mary Jeka. Jeka offers unique insight into academic earmarks, having dealt with funding issues from two perspectives. While working in the office of Senator Robert Kennedy, Jeka frequently fielded funding requests from constituent groups like the numerous universities that fall within the Senator’s jurisdiction. Now, as Tufts’ Vice President of University Relations, Jeka is involved in the issue from another angle, spending much time working to procure government funds for the university and maintaining university-government rela tions.
Keeping with its past, Tufts continues to have a strong relationship with the federal government. Jeka argues that such a relationship is important for schools of all sizes and calibers. “Every university has to have some presence and maintain good relations with our Congressional delegation.” To this end, Jeka and President Bacow frequently meet with the university’s Congressional representatives in local, state, and federal governments. “The most important thing,” Jeka explains, “is to keep up good relations and make sure [our Congressional delegation] understands what we are doing here that they can highlight in Washington.”
To further interests it shares with other schools, Tufts is a member of a number of councils that represent large groups of universities in Washington. The American Council on Education (ACE) is one such organization. Representing more than 1,600 educational institutions, the ACE is one of the education community’s largest lobbying organizations. According to financial statements obtained from its website, the ACE spent over $8 million last year on lobbying efforts. Though the ACE is a registered non-profit organization, it is clear that academic lobbying groups mean business.
With the weight of lobbyists and academic councils behind it, Tufts reaps numerous benefits as a recipient of federal funds. Government funding is widely distributed throughout the university. Many undergraduates benefit from federal funding all universities receive through Tufts’ financial aid programs. Yet the destination of other funds is far less visible to most undergraduate students. Federal funding flows to many of Tufts’ graduate schools and research programs, from a Regional Biosafety Lab to a nutrition center that specializes in obesity research.
Funding from the NIH is particularly important for the university. In 2004, the School of Medicine received over $46 million in grants from NIH, though this number pales in comparison to the figure allotted to medical behemoths like Johns Hopkins, which received nearly half of a billion dollars in grants. Despite these generous past awards, NIH grants, like many sources of federal funding, are drying up due to constraints in the federal budget. This poses a number of problems for university officials concerned about maintaining Tufts’ status as a premier research university. “If we aren’t getting the level of research grants that we have in the past that affects our faculty. Particularly our young faculty who aren’t able to get into the research funding game,” Ms. Jeka asserts.
Jeka, like many Tufts administrators, is not unaware of the controversy surrounding academic earmarks. “Certainly there are abuses in the system,” she remarks. Though she “doesn’t really know” about potential past abuses of the funding, Jeka is adamant in her belief that at least now Tufts deserves every penny it receives, and that the funding process is open and ethical. “I am not afraid to talk to any newspaper… to say what were doing is transparent and I’m not afraid to talk about any of this,” Jeka insists. “It’s not a road to nowhere. We’re not replacing the competitive process in any of this.” Jeka is quick to point out that the university tries to compete for funding when it believes competition is the best route. “If something is a project that would be competitively bid, we don’t ask for that to be earmarked. We say ‘OK, we have to go in and compete.’ For example, we don’t ask for the NIH funds [to be earmarked].”
The Why and How of Federal Money
But ultimately, isn’t Tufts responsible for the controversial surge in earmarks and the birth of the professional lobbyist? “It was certainly the crack in the door that helped propel earmarks along. It opened the lid on a Pandora’s Box,” concedes Steven Ellis. The next time you see a talking head on CNN or Fox News railing against an unethical powerful lobbyist or hounding Congress for fettering away taxpayer money on pet projects, remember that Tufts was (unintentionally) at the beginning of it all. Yet today, the university is very conscious of this image. With government relations, the administration is trying to chart a nuanced course in the black or white political world. Though few are proud of Tufts’ unasked-for distinction as the Pandora of irresponsible spending, recent history suggests that Ballou is genuinely committed to an accountable Washington policy.Amidst calls for greater fiscal transparency and a more responsible investment strategy at Tufts, question about Tufts’ income from the government is unlikely to go away soon. Indeed, in the current political climate, Tufts is left with little choice but to play ball on Capitol Hill and secure important grant money through political access. Most of all, if other universities are in D.C., Tufts has to have a presence there, if only to keep up with other universities’ efforts — to keep up with the Joneses. Still, the school is sensitive about its role as a supplicant in the nation’s capitol.
“Write a fair piece,” Sol Gittleman implores as I leave his office.